Jake Sullivan has cheated death: he's discarded his doomed biological body and copied his consciousness into an android form. The new Jake soon finds love, something that eluded him when he was encased in flesh: he falls for the android version of Karen, a woman rediscovering all the joys of life now that she too is no longer constrained by a worn-out body. Karen's son sues her, claiming that by uploading into an immortal body, she has done him out of his inheritance.

While J. Robert Oppenheimer and his Manhattan Project team struggle to develop the A-bomb, Edward Teller wants something even more devastating: a weapon based on nuclear fusion - the mechanism that powers the sun. But Teller’s research leads to a terrifying discovery: by the year 2030, the sun will eject its outermost layer, destroying the entire inner solar system - including Earth. After the war ends, Oppenheimer’s physicists combine forces with Albert Einstein, computing pioneer John von Neumann, and rocket designer Wernher von Braun.

In the near future, a signal is detected coming from the Alpha Centauri system. Mysterious, unintelligible data streams in for ten years. Heather Davis, a professor in the University of Toronto psychology department, has devoted her career to deciphering the message. Her estranged husband, Kyle, is working on the development of artificial intelligence systems and new computer technology utilizing quantum effects to produce a near-infinite number of calculations simultaneously.

Caitlin Decter is young, pretty, feisty, a genius at math - and blind. Still, she can surf the net with the best of them, following its complex paths clearly in her mind. But Caitlin's brain long ago co-opted her primary visual cortex to help her navigate online. So when she receives an implant to restore her sight, instead of seeing reality, the landscape of the World Wide Web explodes into her consciousness, spreading out all around her in a riot of colors and shapes.

Inheriting your uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who's running the place. Charlie's life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan. Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie. But becoming a supervillain isn't all giant laser death rays and lava pits.

The Face of God is what every young saurian learns to call the immense, glowing object which fills the night sky on the far side of the world. Young Afsan is privileged, called to the distant Capital City to apprentice with Saleed the court astrologer. But when the time comes for Afsan to make his coming-of-age pilgrimage, to gaze upon the Face of God, his world is changed forever- for what he sees will test his faith...and may save his world from disaster!

In this Hugo-nominated novel, an alien walks into a museum and asks if he can see a paleontologist. But the arachnid ET hasn't come aboard a rowboat with the Pope and Stephen Hawking (although His Holiness does request an audience later). Landing at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the spacefarer, Hollus, asks to compare notes on mass extinctions with resident dino-scientist Thomas Jericho.

When a disabled spaceship enters Earth's atmosphere, seven members of the advanced Tosok race are welcomed by the world. Then a popular scientist is murdered, and all evidence points to one of the Tosoks. Now, an alien is tried in a court of law -and there may be far more at stake than accounting for one human life.

Paleontologist Brandon Thackery and his rival, Miles "Klicks" Jordan, fulfill a dinosaur lover's dream with history's first time-travel jaunt to the late Mesozoic. Hoping to solve the extinction mystery, they find Earth's gravity is only half its 21st-century value and dinosaurs that behave very strangely. Could the slimy blue creatures from Mars have something to do with both?

After a rough break up, Wyatt moves to New York City, eager to prove himself while working on Wall Street. When he’s asked to visit the father of his ex-girlfriend, a billionaire tycoon, his fate is sealed. The revolutionary company, Nu-En, launches a radical innovation, an energy that will allow every person on the planet access to power. Only it doesn’t perform as anticipated. Harnessing the ocean has consequences, and highly dangerous creatures emerge from the depths. Soon, the Earth is fracturing, and the world will never be the same.

When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity. Cloning, feel-good drugs, anti-aging programs, and total social control through politics, programming, and media: has Aldous Huxley accurately predicted our future? With a storyteller's genius, he weaves these ethical controversies in a compelling narrative that dawns in the year 632 A.F. (After Ford, the deity). When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity.

In a scrap heap within an abandoned factory, the greatest invention in history lies dormant and unused. By what fatal error of judgment has its value gone unrecognized, its brilliant inventor punished rather than rewarded for his efforts? In defense of those greatest of human qualities that have made civilization possible, one man sets out to show what would happen to the world if all the heroes of innovation and industry went on strike.

Fraa Erasmus is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, protected from the corrupting influences of the "Saecular" world by ancient stone, honored traditions, and complex rituals. Over the centuries, cities, and governments have risen and fallen beyond the concent's walls. Three times during history's darkest epochs, bloody violence born of superstition and ignorance has invaded and devastated the cloistered mathic community.

Thirty-eight years ago, Dr. Sarah Halifax earned worldwide fame by deciphering a radio transmission from an unknown intelligence reaching out from deep space. Now 87, Sarah receives news that, at long last, a new signal has been received, and her services are desperately needed once again.

Twenty years after the discovery of artificial wormholes launches Earth space exploration to unforeseeable heights, Starplex Director Keith Lansing investigates a mysterious vessel that soon threatens the station with intergalactic war.

This is the story of Pierre Tradivel, a scientist, and his complex battle against deadly illness, and ex-Nazi war criminal still hiding in the U.S., a crooked insurance company, and a plot to make Pierre and his wife the victims of a bizarre genetic experiment. Frameshift is hard science fiction at its best, full of complications and neat surprises.

In the near future, a signal is detected coming from the Alpha Centauri system. Mysterious, unintelligible data streams in for ten years. Heather Davis, a professor in the University of Toronto psychology department, has devoted her career to deciphering the message. Her estranged husband, Kyle, is working on the development of artificial intelligence systems and new computer technology utilizing quantum effects to produce a near-infinite number of calculations simultaneously.

Sports agent Myron Bolitar is poised on the edge of the big-time. So is Christian Steele, a rookie quarterback and Myron's prized client. But when Christian gets a phone call from a former girlfriend, a woman who everyone, including the police, believes is dead, the deal starts to go sour. Suddenly Myron is plunged into a baffling mystery of sex and blackmail.

Short novels are movie-length narratives that may well be the perfect length for science fiction stories. This audio collection presents the best-of-the-best short science fiction novels published in 2014 by current and emerging masters of this vibrant form of storytelling.

Six years have passed since Jake Fisher watched Natalie, the love of his life, marry another man. Six years of hiding a broken heart by throwing himself into his career as a college professor. Six years of keeping his promise to leave Natalie alone, and six years of tortured dreams of her life with her new husband, Todd. But six years haven’t come close to extinguishing his feelings, and when Jake comes across Todd’s obituary, he can’t keep himself away from the funeral. There he gets the glimpse of Todd’s wife he’s hoping for...but she is not Natalie....

Milan, Italy, today. It is the most serious crisis that the world has ever faced. Bewildered, young and old, believers and atheists are asking all the same distressing questions: What will they do now that the greatest dream of humanity has turned into a nightmare? What will happen when the countdown clock winds to zero?

It looked for all the world like a terrible, tragic accident. Susanna Morgan had gotten up in the middle of the night, tripped, fallen, and broken her neck. Yet when detective Justin Westwood inspects the victim's apartment, he can't help noticing that the details don't quite add up. The glass on the bedside table is knocked over but there are no cuts on her body. The scrape on her knee looks suspiciously fresh. And then a terrified witness comes forward, confirming his worst fear.

Somewhere in the once-placid streets of San Francisco, a young man is on the run, charged by the media with a crime he didn't commit, hounded by demagogues, hunted by a desperate police department. One cop knows that Kevin Shea is innocent of a brutal racial murder. An ambitious politician will use Shea for her own ends. And a down-and-out lawyer is all that stands between Kevin Shea and an even more atrocious crime. For when there's no law left, justice is the only hope.

Just outside Los Angeles, a prisoner hidden away for 70 years sits up, gets off the bed and disappears through a solid wall. In Australia, a magician impresses audiences by producing real elephants. Nobody realizes it's not an illusion. Across the world, individuals and organizations with supernatural power suddenly detect the presence of something even they can't understand. At the center of it all, Seb Varden, a 32-year old musician with a secret in his past, slits his wrists, is shot dead and run over on the freeway.

A mind-bending, genre-twisting debut novel. In West Akron, there lived a reclusive elderly man who always wore mittens, even in July. He had no friends and no family; all over town, he was known only as The the Man from Primrose Lane. And on a summer day in 2008, someone murdered him.

Alan Gregory is a clinical psychologist with a thriving practice in Boulder, Colorado. His life begins to unravel when one of his female patients is found in an apparent suicide and the local paper begins printing accusations from an unnamed source of sexual impropriety between the woman and Dr. Gregory. He launches a psychological and personal quest for the truth that rapidly intensifies when more of his patients die untimely deaths, and Gregory suspects not only that the deaths are related but that another one of his patients may be somehow involved. Lacking facts but roused by suspicion and troubled by seemingly random acts of terror around him, Gregory starts to fear for the safety of the people he loves. The question of the inviolability of confidential disclosures made to Gregory by his patients - privileged information - becomes crucial as the psychologist pursues an unsettling romance with Lauren Crowder, a lovely deputy district attorney investigating one of the deaths. Bound to silence, Gregory follows the psychological tracks of someone he fears may be a cunning and disturbed killer, while turning to his enigmatic but supportive partner, Diane Estevez, for counsel, and to his tart-tongued female urologist neighbor for support. The sinister, surprising drama unfolds against Boulder's Rocky Mountain backdrop, in the arresting natural beauty of Aspen, and in the midst of a baroque Halloween costume party in downtown Boulder. Finally, in a lonely mountain lodge enshrouded in menace, the story comes to its breathtaking climax.

Ellery Hathaway knows a thing or two about serial killers, but not through her police training. She's an officer in sleepy Woodbury, Massachusetts, where a bicycle theft still makes the newspapers. No one there knows she was once victim number 17 in the grisly story of serial killer Francis Michael Coben. The only victim who lived. When three people disappear from her town in three years, all around her birthday - the day she was kidnapped so long ago - Ellery fears someone knows her secret. Someone very dangerous.

A crippling knee injury forced Elliot Mills to trade in his FBI badge for dusty chalkboards and bored college students. Now a history professor at Puget Sound university, the former agent has put his old life behind him, but it seems his old life isn't finished with him.

Thomas Kilbride is a map-obsessed schizophrenic so affected that he rarely leaves the self-imposed bastion of his bedroom. But with a computer program called Whirl360.com, he travels the world while never so much as stepping out the door. He pores over and memorizes the streets of the world. He examines every address, as well as the people who are frozen in time on his computer screen. Then he sees something that anyone else might have stumbled upon - but has not - in a street view of downtown New York City: an image in a window. An image that looks like a woman being murdered.

The Dead Eyes killer lurks in the backyard of the FBI's famed Behavioral Analysis Unit. His brutal murders, unlike any others previously encountered, confound the local task force, despite the gifted skills of Special Agent Karen Vail, the first female ever promoted to the profiling unit. But along with her keen insight, Vail brings considerable personal and professional baggage—both of which threaten to derail the investigation, destroy her storied career and get her killed.

The name's Lomax-Alex Lomax. I'm the one and only private eye working the mean streets of New Klondike, the Martian frontier town that sprang up forty years ago after Simon Weingarten and Denny O'Reilly discovered fossils on the Red Planet. Back on Earth, where anything can be synthesized, the remains of alien life are the most valuable of all collectibles, so shiploads of desperate treasure hunters stampeded here in the Great Martian Fossil Rush.

While J. Robert Oppenheimer and his Manhattan Project team struggle to develop the A-bomb, Edward Teller wants something even more devastating: a weapon based on nuclear fusion - the mechanism that powers the sun. But Teller’s research leads to a terrifying discovery: by the year 2030, the sun will eject its outermost layer, destroying the entire inner solar system - including Earth. After the war ends, Oppenheimer’s physicists combine forces with Albert Einstein, computing pioneer John von Neumann, and rocket designer Wernher von Braun.

In the near future, a signal is detected coming from the Alpha Centauri system. Mysterious, unintelligible data streams in for ten years. Heather Davis, a professor in the University of Toronto psychology department, has devoted her career to deciphering the message. Her estranged husband, Kyle, is working on the development of artificial intelligence systems and new computer technology utilizing quantum effects to produce a near-infinite number of calculations simultaneously.

In this Hugo-nominated novel, an alien walks into a museum and asks if he can see a paleontologist. But the arachnid ET hasn't come aboard a rowboat with the Pope and Stephen Hawking (although His Holiness does request an audience later). Landing at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the spacefarer, Hollus, asks to compare notes on mass extinctions with resident dino-scientist Thomas Jericho.

In 2059, two vastly different groups of people portrayed by the compelling trio of Brendan Fraser (Academy Award winner), Luke Kirby (Emmy Award winner), and Vanessa Sears (Dora Award winner) undergo cryonic suspension. While their bodies are frozen, their minds, still active and awake, are uploaded into a massive quantum computer. The first group are all astronauts, about to leave Earth on a one-way interstellar colonization mission. The second group consists of convicted murderers and volunteers who elect to serve their sentences in a virtual-reality prison.

Caitlin Decter is young, pretty, feisty, a genius at math - and blind. Still, she can surf the net with the best of them, following its complex paths clearly in her mind. But Caitlin's brain long ago co-opted her primary visual cortex to help her navigate online. So when she receives an implant to restore her sight, instead of seeing reality, the landscape of the World Wide Web explodes into her consciousness, spreading out all around her in a riot of colors and shapes.

This is the story of Pierre Tradivel, a scientist, and his complex battle against deadly illness, and ex-Nazi war criminal still hiding in the U.S., a crooked insurance company, and a plot to make Pierre and his wife the victims of a bizarre genetic experiment. Frameshift is hard science fiction at its best, full of complications and neat surprises.

A scientific experiment begins, and as the button is pressed, the unexpected occurs: everyone in the world goes to sleep for a few moments while everyone's consciousness is catapulted more than twenty years into the future. At the end of those moments, when the world reawakens, all human life is transformed by foreknowledge.

Twenty years after the discovery of artificial wormholes launches Earth space exploration to unforeseeable heights, Starplex Director Keith Lansing investigates a mysterious vessel that soon threatens the station with intergalactic war.

The Face of God is what every young saurian learns to call the immense, glowing object which fills the night sky on the far side of the world. Young Afsan is privileged, called to the distant Capital City to apprentice with Saleed the court astrologer. But when the time comes for Afsan to make his coming-of-age pilgrimage, to gaze upon the Face of God, his world is changed forever- for what he sees will test his faith...and may save his world from disaster!